Let me help out this new subreddit with a tale about my first professional job.

Back in 1991, I had just graduated with a degree in civil engineering. Over the course of 6 months, I sent out around 60 applications, mostly responding to newspaper ads. It was snail mail in those days, so things took time. In addition, I had just (after graduation) moved to my wife's country so I spoke little of the language, so I knew that it might take some time.

To every application except 2, I received a response. Thanks for applying but no (mostly), come for an interview (a precious few), or we are reviewing your application along with all the others.

Of the 2 that did not respond, I called them after about 6 weeks. With one company, the contact person (the engineering manager, Vincent) asked me to tell him about myself. I gave a quick 2 minute spiel, after which he asked me to come in the next day. It was a city 400 kilometres (about 250 miles) away. After being assured, that my flight would be reimbursed, I agreed.

The next morning, I flew over, took a cab and showed up at their offices around mid-morning. I asked the receptionist for Vincent. She looked at me quizzically and said that he had just flown to another city that morning for a meeting....... I was immediately dejected. In desperate hope that I might salvage the trip, I explained my reason for being there and asked if there was anyone else with whom I could meet. She made a couple of calls and found a project manager (Dan) that would meet with me.

Dan and I spoke for over an hour in a very informal and friendly way. I had expected technical or professional questions, but mostly he was interested in where I now lived, because he had a vacation home very close to there. I flew home that afternoon, without much hope.

The next morning, Vincent called me back and apologized for forgetting that he was to be out of town that day. He said that he had spoken with Dan, and they agreed to offer me a job. I accepted and started about a month later.

Soon after starting, I spoke with another young engineer (Helen). She told me the story behind my application. She explained that while Vincent was a smart engineer, he was also a bit disorganized. The newspaper ad had generated around 250 responses for the 2 open positions that they had. All these applications sat on Vincent's desk for a few weeks untouched. After that, he pushed the whole pile over to Helen and asked her to review them and come with recommendations. She went through all of them and came up with her top 50 candidates and wrote a one paragraph review of each of those 50. This list along with the now much reduced pile of applications was then sent back to Vincent, where it again sat on his desk, untouched for several more weeks.

Then, came my call to the company (to which I referred earlier). In my 2 minute spiel, I found out that Vincent really was not listening to me, but rather searching the list to see if I was one of the 50 that Helen had recommended. Fortunately, I was, and that was why he called me in.

A short while later, I spoke with the 1 other engineer that they hired at the same time as me. It turned out that he too called Vincent after several weeks, wondering why he had not gotten a response and was also on the 50 person short-list.

In the last 20 years, I have since worked for a variety of companies and know this to be the exception rather than the rule. However, it is not that rare that this kind of thing happens. So, be persistent and follow-up your applications, because maybe you'll get lucky in unexpected ways.